Trump's pool 'vandals' left tracks — tire tracks

The $15 million pool came down for the second time in three months — and the internet zeroed in on two straight lines of ruined paint that look a lot like something eight tons heavy rolled through.

The water is gone from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool again, and what’s left on the bottom is two long, parallel scars of shredded blue paint.

Photos of the drained basin started ripping across social media Monday, and the reading was instant and brutal: those aren’t knife cuts. Those are tire tracks — and everyone knows whose.

Because there is video. On May 7, while the fresh “American Flag Blue” coating was still going down, Donald Trump’s motorcade — including the roughly 20,000-pound presidential limousine known as The Beast — rolled straight across the empty pool floor so the president could inspect the color he’d personally picked. NBC cameras caught the convoy crossing wet paint and leaving tire marks behind. The White House wasn’t embarrassed. Communications chief Steven Cheung posted the video himself, captioned “they see me rolling!”

Three days earlier, Trump had stood at the pool bragging that the new coating was indestructible. “If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it,” he said on May 4. “So strong, so powerful. It’s like powerful rubber.”

Within weeks of the pool refilling, the uncuttable coating was peeling off in chunks and the water had turned swamp green. Trump’s explanation: vandals. Sick people with “a box-cutter or a knife of some kind,” he said, who slashed a 350-foot slit in the lining. Six people were arrested. One of them, former Olympic canoe racer David Hearn, has pleaded not guilty — he says he stopped mid-bike-ride, touched a flap of lining that was already loose, and got swarmed by Park Police and held five hours without a phone call.

Coating specialists never bought the knife story. The blue material is polyurea, which needs each layer applied inside tight curing windows — and this job was crushed into roughly eight weeks to hit a July 4 deadline it missed anyway. The pool spent America’s 250th birthday behind a fence.

Now it’s empty for the second time in three months. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum laid out the plan with a straight face: “Drain the water, clean up the fireworks stuff. Repair the vandalism that was done. Fill it back up again.”

The repair bill tells its own story. Trump launched this as a $1.5 million spruce-up. It now stands at $14.7 million and climbing — flowing through a no-bid contract to Virginia’s Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the same firm now hired to redo its own work. Asked about the timeline and the new cost, the owner declined to answer. Senator Richard Blumenthal has a probe open into the contract.

The White House has heard the tire-track theory and hates it. “This is dumb and unfounded,” spokeswoman Taylor Rogers snapped when it first surfaced in June. Even the skeptics’ experts stop short of a verdict — the motorcade, one coating-industry chair said, is one of several suspects in a proper failure analysis, alongside the rushed job itself.

But here’s what no one in the administration has explained: why the convoy drove across an unfinished pool floor at all. Or why the damage keeps showing up where the internet swears the wheels went. Or how a coating a knife supposedly couldn’t cut got slashed for 350 feet by a guy on a bicycle.